Guest blogging on Moz.com: Good location to get ripples

Last week I checked the company blog of moz.com for ripples, with truly astounding numbers. This week I decided to check on their user generated content - you find it at moz.com/ugc.

First, I pulled all urls from the sitemap moz.com/ugc-sitemap.xml , then again used the ripple script to get the number of ripples = public shares per url. Each url stands for a blog guest post. 

The results are impressive again - user generated content on 1708 posts generates 1251 ripples, with the top posts having 73 and 56 ripples.

The top post "http://moz.com/ugc/google-plus-authorship-one-critical-thing-you-need-to-know" author +Samuel Scott currently is in 222 people's circles on G+ currently, and I doubt there are many other places, if any, where he could have gotten as many shares as here (nor would I or many others, just to be clear).

Again - moz is a great place for seo content, and this narrow focus now on inbound marketing is highly beneficial for readers, for writers, and for the company.
Imagine to add 1251 ripples to YOUR site with guest blogging! 

Public shares on Google Plus: Moz.com with impressive strategy

What an excellent strategy to run a community with top level specialist on your main domain!

While we all should know that this kind of guest blog is highly valuable, I did not expect the extent of impact. Guests write their posts and under certain settings they are 'promoted' to the front page of the blog. Moz offers us a tool to take a closer look - a sitemap of blogposts (moz.com/blog-sitemap.xml).

Just to get an idea how relevant this is, I used my ripple script to check how many ripples each of these posts has accumulated. (Ripples being public shares on Google Plus). This has the usual limitations, it is just like a screenshot at a certain moment and angle.

Total shares of the urls in the sitemap: 26,584. Wow!
Even the Google homepage currently has only 8283 ripples. The highest ranking posts are "Google plus correlations" with 980 ripples, and "ranking factors 2013" with 633 ripples.

That's a LOT of social links and activity to add to a domain!

moz blog ripples

Google Home ripples

Check sharpening modes with imagemagick for blogging

Blogging needs pictures - and the pictures need to be good and small. To reduce pictures in size, I use imagemagick and run it on a folder like described with this recent script.

Depending on the source and target size of the picture, darkness and details various settings are getting the best results - there is not one best setting. So how to efficiently figure out which is best?

I move the pictures I want to use in a separate folder, and then run below script to check several settings in the 'unsharp' mask. Then I just open them in a viewer, and flip back / forth between pictures, delete the less good one until I am left with the one I will use.

#!bash
if [[ ! -d $1 ]]
then mkdir "$1"
fi
for i in *.jpg
do echo "processing $i"
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25%  "$1"/"$i"_0s    # no sharpen
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25% -unsharp 1.2x1.2+1+0 "$1"/"$i"_1s   # best with raffia - high contrast
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25% -unsharp 1.2x1.2+0.5+0 "$1"/"$i"_2s # best for 600 px tent (dark)
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25% -unsharp 0x1.2+0.5+0 "$1"/"$i"_3s # best for 800px tent
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25% -unsharp 0x1.2+5+0 "$1"/"$i"_4s # good with raffia
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25% -unsharp 0x1.4+5+0 "$1"/"$i"_5s # good with raffia
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25% -unsharp 1.5x1+0.7+0.02 "$1"/"$i"_6s # forum 2 // good outside
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25% -unsharp 0x0.75+0.75+0.008 "$1"/"$i"_7s # forum 1 // good outside
convert "$i" -resize "${1}>" -quality 25% -unsharp 0x6+0.5+0 "$1"/"$i"_8s # gimp   // good outside

done

It has a little shortcut - linux seems not to care about the file ending (jpg), and displays the files fine. this way I can have the filename first, and then the variation number of the script. While in the photo viewer, this helps to have all variations of the same picture after each other for the back / forth deletion process. At the end I just need to rename the final picture for use.